Posted
by
kdawson
on Sunday April 08, 2007 @07:02AM
from the write-fax-or-email dept.

ZJMX writes "Microsoft is going through its email and phone lists asking people to support their opposition to California A.B. 1668 — 'Open Document Format, Open Source' — by writing to the California Assemblymen involved in this bill (contact info in the link). Apparently they fear that California will join Massachusetts in wanting documents based on open standards in their government. Let's see if this community can raise as much support for the California ODF bill as Microsoft can raise opposition."

"Blah blah blah politics. Bitch bitch bitch IBM did this so now we do it."

I read this hoping for some key points in distinguishing the functionality or benefits versus costs in using either format.

Nope.

The closest they get to that is "ODF is tightly tied to OOo." Oh, no! Not that! You know, that argument is null and void, right? Because these document formats are supposed to be open, like the names of both of them imply. Who cares if it's not yet integrated into your product, either format should allow that. It is, in fact, confusing to me why they don't let both formats exist and allow the government bodies to pick whatever the hell the want to store their data in. That's all this is, a political issue which is why it's filed in the politics section I guess.

If Microsoft truly believed their product to be superior to the alternative, they would sit back and let California make the mistake. Then, when everything falls apart, they could step in and save the day, while at the same time setting a precident for one format being better than the other. But, we all know that's not going to happen because I haven't heard Massachussetts hurting due to their choice. So, I guess Mr. Ballmer is going to have to set his fears aside & simply come to the harsh realization that another community developed format is just as good or better than their format. Heads up, ODF community, he just may fucking kill you.

And I certainly don't appreciate them demonizing IBM. "Big bad evil corporation launches national campaign to force their consumers into using something!" Pot calling the kettle black, in my opinion. If you could track the amount of money I have paid to a company--directly or indirectly--I would wager that I've paid IBM far less than Microsoft and I feel that IBM has done far more for me than Microsoft.

Shut up and let the consumer decide, Microsoft. Nothing's wrong with unbiased comparisons in helping them decide but you've got a conflict of interest here so I highly doubt anyone will swallow your tripe.

Which still is a lot better than the current situation - as is only MS Office will be able to open and convert them, and after that MS Office ALSO will be the only app able to EDIT THE CONVERTED FILES.

There are a few tags which are not explicit in their implementation which exist for legacy purposes only, such as supporting defunct features found in Word 95.

And because the standard contains these tags but does not contain the information required to implement them, nobody but Microsoft can implement them. A standard that is designed in such a way that only one company can implement it fully is not an "open" standard in any conventional sense of the word.

Yes, an implementation that doesn't include these tags will not be disadvantaged in practical terms, but that doesn't mean it's not a big deal. Because what this means is that Microsoft will be able to say, quite truthfully, that only Microsoft can offer a 100%-compliant implementation of the standard. This is not how open standards should be - the whole purpose of open standards is to level the playing field and let products compete on their true merits. Being able to wrap Asian text in exactly the same way as Word 6.0 for Macintosh is not a big advantage for the average American consumer, but what average American consumer is going to understand that when Microsoft says "OpenOffice.org is not 100% compliant!", they're talking about crap like that? The sole purpose of these tags is to enable Microsoft to use misleading advertising. This is not what standards are for.

You mean like these [msdn.com] legacy tags that only OpenOffice can implement? (yeah, I know it's a Microsoft site, but the only other reference I was able to find was this [slashdot.org]/. post).

According to Microsoft, the only way those legacy tags will ever be found is if they came from a document that was created by an old version of Office. So it should be really easy to verify if current versions of office ever produce those "legacy" tags.

Read the Brian Jones article. Microsoft chose to describe (but not define) ALL of the elements produced by Office 12. OpenOffice chose to neither describe or define many of the elements produced by OpenOffice, describing them as "extensions".Which is better: A fully described (but not fully defined) specification or a partially described but fully defined specification (assuming, of course that ODF is fully defined (it's not totally clear that it is (see the office:binary-data element in the ODF specifica

These formats have absolutely nothing to do with the.DOC format..DOC was literally a memory dump of the data structures. The XML files are well structured. Style and content are highly separated. They are quite easy to read and understand.

That's because you don't understand the context. XML isn't for making documents easy for *people* to read and understand, it's for making documents easy for *programs* to read and understand.

It's far easier to make a computer program read and understand the XML excerpt you quoted than it is to make a computer program read and understand a document that, when encoded, looks like binary gibberish.

Uhm, you're totally wrong. The idea with XML was to make it (reasonably well) readable by humans. The extract shown before hardly is.What would be most easy to read for a computerprogram would probably some "binary gibberish" as this could be more or less a dump of the RAM portion that deals with the document (not unlike the old.doc). No processing necessary at all at file read. That's very different from XML which needs quite extensive processing (however not so much that you don't mind the overhead).

The idea with XML was to make it (reasonably well) readable by humans.

That's certainly an advantage, but the biggest benefit is the existence of standardized XML parsing libraries. Other formats, like \nattribute:value\n, are just as human readable.

The extract shown before hardly is.

No, it's quite clear. The < > indicate a tag; the w: indicates the namespace of the tag; some tags have attributes. Closing tags have a / before the >. The semantics of tag names and attributes are defined by th

Of course, I omitted the declarations of text styles T1 through T4, but they're also pretty clear.

It looks like Microsoft has tried to make their tags very compact for some reason, perhaps in a mistaken effort to reduce file size. That's foolish since any XML-based format is going to result in large file sizes unless compressed, and if you're compressing anyway, more verbose and hence more self-explanatory tag names don't cost anything[*]. Personally, I find the OpenDoc version to be much clearer. I also think it's much better to apply style attributes to text spans, rather than to define tags that implement specific stylistic effects (bold, italic, etc.).

IMO, OpenDoc is not only more open, it's clearer and better-designed as well.

[*] Given a perfect compression algorithm, the cost of using more verbose tags is precisely zero, because the longer tags don't increase the entropy of the file. The reality, of course, is that compression algorithms aren't perfect, and there may be a small cost, but in practice the algorithms are good enough that the cost is negligible, particularly for large documents where it really matters.

It looks like Microsoft has tried to make their tags very compact for some reason, perhaps in a mistaken effort to reduce file size. That's foolish since any XML-based format is going to result in large file sizes unless compressed, and if you're compressing anyway, more verbose and hence more self-explanatory tag names don't cost anything[*]. Personally, I find the OpenDoc version to be much clearer. I also think it's much better to apply style attributes to text spans, rather than to define tags that impl

Given that, I think it's sensible to reduce element and attribute names in order to produce better load/save performance.

I don't, though I'll grant the point a little more validity in the case of spreadsheet data, in which there's basically no way to prevent the tags from utterly dominating the data content. Even in that case, though, performance issues are temporary, especially since the question is CPU-bound, not I/O or even memory-bound, whereas data interoperability and comprehensibility are forever. In fact, I think the Office team has made a number of short-sighted decisions in the interest of performance, including

Sorry, that's wrong because it's not precisely zero, the entropy of the tag has increased.

You're right, of course, in the general case. But the additional entropy is fixed and can be moved into the compressor, and out of the compressed file, in which case the entropy of the long tag is the same as the entropy of the short tag. But I shouldn't assume that's what's done, both because it's considered cheating in a theoretical analysis and because in reality specialized compressors are not being used.

In any case, however, the practical difference between compressed large-tag files and compress

There are a few tags which are not explicit in their implementation which exist for legacy purposes only, such as supporting defunct features found in Word 95.
These formats have absolutely nothing to do with the.DOC format..DOC was literally a memory dump of the data structures. The XML files are well structured. Style and content are highly separated. They are quite easy to read and understand.

Sorry mate, but bullshit. Yes, the DOC format was an object serialization of the in-memory format. But OOXML is no saint by any measure. Not only does it include references to Word 95, but also Word 6.0, Word 5.0, Word 97, Word 2002, and Wordperfect 6.x [slashdot.org]. It also references several Word/Office versions on the Macintosh, because heavens forbid MS make a cross-platform application that works the same on both Windows and Mac. It even references east Asian font rendering in a specific version of Word. And note I say "references", because that's all the standard does. Finding out what all those different versions of MS Office did on both Windows and Macintosh, and possibly also for different languages or regions of the world is left up to anyone trying to implement Microsoft's "Open" Office XML format. Even though the documentation for OOXML is huge compared to ODF, these details are still not included.

So please tell me, what do these few tags/attributes do?

lineWrapLikeWord6

mwSmallCaps

shapeLayoutLikeWW8

truncateFontHeightsLikeWP6

useWord2002TableStyleRules

useWord97LineBreakRules

wpJustification

shapeLayoutLikeWW8

Anyone claiming OOXML is in any way comparable to ODF is either misinformed and/or a shill. As we can see with this story, MS has a lot of money and influence to throw around for the purpose of muddying the waters and making OOXML look like a viable "standard".

"You understand it wrong. The OpenXML format is completely open for every feature implemented in Office 2007 [...]"

The problem with this statement is that Office 2007 still contains most of the code base for Office 95, and it contains the code of every Office version thereafter. So unless you know something I don't know -- there is no way to be sure that "the OpenXML format is completely open for every feature" of Office 2007.

The second problem is that during its anti-trust case, Bill Gates was on the record saying that his Office Suite wasn't tied to his Operating System, and that some kind of wall was erected between those two divisions so they couldn't talk to each other and share undocumented features, when in fact current analysis of their leaked code -- shows the exact opposite -- that their Office suite was indeed and (still is) closely intermingled with their OS at the undocumented system's calls level.

So for you to be so sure of the openness of OpenXML, you must not only know something I don't, but you must also be far more knowledgeable than Bill Gates was on this subject, since he either lied under oath about this particular topic, or was just too ignorant to know what was happening at the source code implementation level.

In either case, I'm not even sure why we're even discussing this. If you have to argue, and if I have to take your word for it, that a particular piece of closed source code, inside an "open" data format, does nothing that's needed by Office 2007, then this "open" format is not really open -- is it?

> So for you to be so sure of the openness of OpenXML, you> must not only know something I don't, but you must also> be far more knowledgeable than Bill Gates was on this> subject, since he either lied under oath about this> particular topic, or was just too ignorant to know what> was happening at the source code implementation level.It is on record that M$ has even lied to its own staff about development/release timeframes.

The OpenXML format is completely open for every feature implemented in Office 2007 and contains a very verbose standard...

That's part of the problem. Its way toooo verbose. There's no reason why public documents should give MS a huge headstart on everyone else as far as supporting a format goes, and there's no reason why everyone else should be stuck supporting MS feature-bloat either.

Excessive complexity should be avoided. It gives us things like laws only lawyers can understand.

Let's see here, "A lot of hype - and smoke and mirrors obfuscation - surrounds interoperability these days," Microsoft wrote in an open letter published on its Web site.Mmm-hmm, like about 6000 pages worth...

They are quite easy to read and understand.Either you're lying through your teeth, (er, keyboard), or you've never actually tried to read the whole thing!

I'm sorry, but when the BlueTooth spec is only 1500 pages and it's been how many years before companies could agree on

okay shootout time get a office 2003 document that is reasonably sized and complicated (say a ten page nontrivial document)now pull it up in both Open office and then in MS office 2007 and convert to native format (ie both xml formats)grade each file on

1 how well the convert went (fonts margins/style yadda)2 rip each file down to the xml payload and then try to understand the file (get a geek to try to do the render in his head)3 file size (smaller is better)

I think you are missing the real issue here which is, why is a corporation interfering in the business of a duly elected Government, and telling it how to spend the Tax Payers money? (spend it on me?) What has happened to the sham democracy? How does this represent the interests of the people any better than a dictatorship in a third world country?

Ergo the good old US is not a democratic country. And does not honor the rule of law "for the people by the people" but the rule of money and the rule of force.

Dear Corporate Lobbyist and Dogmatist with spin-magic and revisionist-bullshit;(~1982~1992), in the early days of home HS/ADP technology, When microsoft was but a baby corps, there were many many operating systems (OS) and file formats for each and every OS/application. Then microsoft said

(~1989~1994) lets provide file format conversion for all our big competitors file formats to microsoft file formates. As microsoft fed on conversion converts and got to be the biggest, fattest, and dumbest OSD (original so

Google is not a monopoly because you can decide to use MSN Search or Yahoo or Altavista, or whatever search engine you want. You can also decide to go with one of Google's competitors in the advertising market.Microsoft was a monopoly because you couldn't get a computer without Windows on it, and in fact they used their enormous market share to dictate to vendors that there would be no alternatives.

Attacking someone from hate is one of the most powerful methods of argument, so long as you present factual re

If a country (China) makes it the law to "roll over" on bloggers and IM users, then google have no choice but to comply with the law or cease doing business in China.The government of China is not a pushover like the EU or US, where large companies can string things along, negotiate their own (non)punishment and get away with paying trivial fines several years late when inflation has made them all but worthless. If you don't do what the Chinese government want, they will come down on your hard.So google hav

The benefits of avoiding vendor lock, true interoperability fostering competition among the software vendors etc will ulitmately benefit the consumers. No doubt about it. Among the consumers the biggest block is the corporate America and these big companies that spend billions of dollars. But they dont seem to care much for OpenDoc and are, persumably willingly, paying whatever MSFT is billing them. What is going on? Bigname PC vendors all compete on price and not single one of them is trying to differentiate themselves from rest of the pack by pre loading the windows boxes with OpenOffice or FireFox or Gimp. Corporate America is not demanding true interoperability and a level playing field for their vendors. Either there is some serious wrong doing by MSFT like bribing IT managers and giving kick backs to PC vendors. Or these people are really dumb. Still I think the time to celebrate is when corporate America decides not lock up their data in a format owned by someone else. Politicians are fickle. A few thousand in campaign contributions they will sing MSFT anthem and betray their voters.

Either there is some serious wrong doing by MSFT like bribing IT managers and giving kick backs to PC vendors.

I think that the major PC vendors are in bed with MS for the following reason: it gives them a huge advantage against small VAR PC vendors and/or people who would build their own PC.

My company used to build workstations for our customers; we didn't make a profit on them (it's all about the service) but could price them competitively. At this point, with the prices and availability (or lack the

Cant you guys sue MSFT + DELL + HPQ under antitrust laws? If you can band together and sue get upto discovery process and find the true price MSFT is charging the big name vendors. Still please do hang in there, a class action law suite will come eventually and you may be able recoup the losses you suffered by paying full reatail price for WinOS. Right now MSFT looks invincible and no one is willing to take a at it. But someday the logjam will break and the pendulum will swing so far that we might eve

A homebuilder will just transfer hers/his license to the newbuilt computer and s/he can get a lot more bang for the bucks.
Yes, I do know girls who build their own computers...

You can avoid gender specific language by replacing he/she/s/he with they/their: A homebuilder will just transfer their license to the newbuilt computerUnless of course you were countering the male domination of computing. If so, good one.

In the 1600s, 'they' and 'their' were used both for plurals and gender-neutral pronouns. Then prescriptivists got hold of the language and told us that it was wrong. We still use them in that 'bad' way, and it's in our mental grammars, but people try to make us feel guilty about it.

Surprise, _yes_, Microsoft lobbies IT managers and even managers from higher levels. And they have done it some much that managers already have used to it and assumes it as "natural" right to have "gifts" from Microsoft. Not to blame only Microsoft entirely, it is common "marketing style" of lot of companies who produces so-so products.

It is corruption? yes. Corruption is still corruption, whatever government or shareholder's company is involved. However, you will have hard time to convince those managers not to accept these presents. Because overall atmosphere and dignity in such jobs are long gone. Only if you inform heavily shareholders you maybe will do something.

Big business leaders don't know IT. For that matter, few people in IT really know IT, but that is another rant.

Someone who can run a transport company successfully and knows that only a fool would allow your company to be totally dependent on one vehicle supllier will NOT realise that the same thing applies to the computers controlling the fleet of vehicles.

Standard example, every truck fleet owner has a favorite brand, yet they always got a couple of trucks that are of a different brand. The reason, simple, it makes negotiations a bit easier. Sure out of the 500 trucks in company 490 will be say Mercedes BUT on the day the Mercedes rep comes to talk about a new order you can bet that the 10 daf trucks will be proudly parked right outside the office. Just a hint that the order does not have to go to Mercedes this time.

That is because trucking company directors understand trucking. They do not understand IT. So when the MS salesrep arrives he will have confirmed via outlook, using documents created in office and be assured of seeing nothing but windows machines as he visits the office.

Offcourse he still gives a nice discount. That is easy. Establish the true price, hike it by a couple of hundred percent, give a discount of 50% percent and you got MS record profits.

And the really odd thing is that all those directors who wouldn't trust a truck maker who reported the same kind of profits as MS think it is a good sign that MS is making such huge profits.

People do NOT understand fields that they are not experts in and this goes triple for IT.

Couple this with the old maxim, nobody has ever been fired for buying Microsoft and you got the current situation.

It is changing but you are going to have to fight a bloody struggle to get anywhere. Remember, if you introduce linux into a company and suddenly costs plummet and productivity soars you will have made an awfull lot of enemies, every single person who said that MS software was the way to go.

I was in this situation once. A company had two websites belonging to different divesions. The one I was responsible for ran a webshop and services for customers and offcourse ran on linux cheapo hardware. The intraweb was purely windows and was run by the internal IT department but it also contained some sites available to our resellers and such. My divesion was brought back in under the umbrella of the mother coorperation, our website sold more products then all other sales efforts combined, so rather then being an experiment we turned into the biggest sales channel.

Anyway, oneday a director asked the question of why the intraweb was down once again, and for some reason the question was asked NOT to the internal IT department but to the web department (probably the doofus didn't realize the difference).

So what was I supposed to do? The reason the intraweb sucked was simple, it was run on windows, with IIS (or ISS, what ever acronym stands for steaming pile of garbage, was run by windows admins, and just wasn't designed by anyone who cared.

Yet for some reason, the idea seemed to be that since the director new that we used linux and windows and that the intraweb sucked that linux was used for the intraweb. And since everyone knows I run Linux I was told to convert the site to windows to fix the troubles and get help from the internal IT department.

Can you guess how many seconds it took me to reactivate my CV on monsterboard?

It was not that the guy in question was an idiot, he knew his business. It just didn't happen to be IT. And what could I do? My department was supposed to merge with the internal IT department and since they wore suits it was pretty clear to me who would end up as whose boss.

So I arranged some job interviews, and just told them that linux sadly wasn't up to the job and that switching the external site to windows was the best way to go, but sadly I did not have the qualifications to do that so the internal IT department should handle it, and handed in

Standard example, every truck fleet owner has a favorite brand, yet they always got a couple of trucks that are of a different brand. The reason, simple, it makes negotiations a bit easier. Sure out of the 500 trucks in company 490 will be say Mercedes BUT on the day the Mercedes rep comes to talk about a new order you can bet that the 10 daf trucks will be proudly parked right outside the office. Just a hint that the order does not have to go to Mercedes this time.

The analogy is bad, but the strategy might still be effective... make sure that the conference room that the MS sales rep is led into has an X desktop running on the projector when he walks in - maybe even give him a presentation using OpenOffice. If he asks questions, make it clear that you are weighing going to Linux-OpenOffice depending on his quote.

Or maybe he'd just call your bluff:) But hey, it worked for some cities in Europe...

The story about asus website doesn't suprise me a bit. It ain't that Asus ain't spending any money on it and it ain't that it is impossible to run a website like that well. Just that anyone who can, won't do windows. Someone at the asus management level probably said they wanted an Windows Website and nobody qualified will touch that.

For what it's worth I'd like to point out several things:

1. It is damn near impossible to find good PHP developers. Hacks are easy to find but we don't want hacks working on cu

The reason that it's hard to find good PHP hackers is because good hackers understand that it has a flawed security model.* Good hackers would far rather work with good tools instead of dealing with the headaches of fixing broken tools.

*Yes, I know that the PHP devs have been working to clear up some of the problems, and it's better than it was. Still, there's a reason that good coders tend to steer clear of the language.

WIndows is very popular with small and medium sized businesses because Joe in the office can run a tape backup and it doesn't take an IT expert to do basic administration. They can call you if they need anything more technical. I assume your customers are fairly small or department sized based on your comment that they do not do backups?? Good lord! I would be hesistant to do business with such companies because if the volume on the raid ever becomes corrupt they will blame you for it and your reputation wo

If all the suites acted like the one you have described there wouldn't be any Linux in corporates. Linux may not be used as a desktop OS. It is being used and is extending its market share on server side.

I do agree there are some who are ignorant and are not willing to use Linux at all.

With a client I am working with, we did a cost analysis for using Linux on desktop and for their business we found using Linux helps in reducing cost by 28% over 3 years compared to windows (Including Support from Novell,

My company is "only" 2000 people. Every PC gets wiped as soon as it comes in the door, and is then loaded with a standard setup. It doesn't matter what Dell puts on there, that is just important for smaller companies. What does matter is that we have tenthousands of documents in our internal knowledge base. Many of them are powerpoints where slide 3 contains an embedded Excel sheet, itself containing an embedded Word document. How they will ever get out of that mess is beyond my imagination.

I have a few thoughts about that. Basically, I believe it will come down to a clever set of programs that are used as SAS on the company's intranet. That is to say when a document isn't loading correctly, open a browser and go to the conversion site, click the upload link and have the converted document emailed back to you, or some similar kind of thing. That means only one install of the converters, only one place to worry about it. Anyone can use them.This is how things should be done anyway, use the int

Either there is some serious wrong doing by MSFT like bribing IT managers and giving kick backs to PC vendors. Or these people are really dumb. Still I think the time to celebrate is when corporate America decides not lock up their data in a format owned by someone else. Politicians are fickle. A few thousand in campaign contributions they will sing MSFT anthem and betray their voters.

Sorry, but you have it exactly backwards. I spent 12 years working for various government contractors. Contractors need to be able to read bidding specifications, supply documents for bids, pose questions regarding bidding specs, provide cost analysis data, etc. to the Government. If the Government uses Word and Excel, for example, so does the contractor. If you have a prime/subcontractor relationship, then all of the subs will use Word and Excel as well, as that is what the prime uses to communicate with the Government. OTOH, if the Government breaks the mold and begins to use ODF, then the Government's supply chain will as well. The Government is big enough to pull this off, but no single company can do the same.

Erm, I know we shouldn't feed trolls, but you clearly don't understand a couple of key points here.

Firstly - "chickenfeed" on Windows and MS Office? Are you insane? Have you ever been involved in procurement for the Microsoft tools? I'm guessing not, as then you'd realise just how expensive it is to provide Windows, Office and a few other bits and bobs for a 10,000+ strong userbase. Either that or you're Bill Gates and several million dollars is chickenfeed to you.

Did the email even originate from Microsoft? As far as I can tell, all we have is a single email received by a single person. Perhaps it's a delayed April Fool's joke or something of that sort? It would be incredibly stupid (even for Microsoft) to send out official emails like this.

Even if several people receive such emails, that doesn't prove it is from Microsoft. Is there any official reaction by them, or proof that it came from an official Microsoft email account?

In the letter Microsoft talks about the importance of their customers having a choice. But apparently they don't want their consumers to have the choice between using Open XML or ODF in their product. Besides, using standards always implies lack of choice, and in the case of standards that is in principle a good thing. I don't really care wther Open XML or ODF prevails als THE open standard, but please let ir be really open so I can use whatever Office suite I want!

I didn't say that MS doesn't want their customers to have a choice. But isn't it logicl that the gouvernment would want ONE standard, and not two? And the fact that this standard is not MS's Open XML should not matter to MS. They just incorporate ODF and continue business as usual. If Open XML was a truly open standard MS shouldn't whine about this legislation. The fact that they do is at least suspicious.

Microsoft seem to have become a very large and well funded political lobbying group.

Sure they buy in lots of software and rebrand it, they also copy a load of stuff and then try to bundle into their existing products. However, have they actually developed anything in the last year or two that did not suck and then disappear?

...Microsoft knows that the one and only thing that is preserving their monopoly is Microsoft Office as a standard. If that ever goes away, so does their monopoly. Anyone can run a Mac or Linux and have 75% of their needs happily met via these (or any other) operating system. The one piece missing is fully compatible office software. So, Microsoft needs to hold everyone hostage with proprietary Office formats.

Yet everyone can see just how bad of a "standard" it really is. It seems like every new version costs more and comes with a brand new format. What standardized format changes every 2 years? Or better yet, what true standard doesn't allow extensible additions to it for future expansion?

One of Microsoft's innovations is our ability to help millions of customers with our proprietary file formats. If large purchasers, such as your state government, wrongly conclude that an open standard is in their best interest, Microsoft's proprietary file format becomes substantially less valuable to all Americans, and indeed, the world.

So let us describe to you what will happen if this proposal becomes reality:

(1) Microsoft will need to compete with other products based on attributes other than file format. In turn, Microsoft products will rise in price by millions of dollars, leading to riots in your neighborhood.

(2) This will forever make the USA a 3rd world country. China will be willing to step in and take over Microsoft's responsibility as the engine of the American economy.

(3) An American innovator and icon will no longer be the richest man in the world. Americans will no longer be proud or patriotic; most, if not all, will end up voting against you. Microsoft will no longer be a name loved by millions of children - instead, it could be "Al Jezerra".

Please make your decision carefully. We have included a check of $50,000 to put towards your next campaign. See you at the golf tournament next week!

Consider that I have documents in WP5.1 format, a text-editor from Clarkson University, Yeah Write files, some IBM PC-Write docs, and both MS Word and, lest we forget, MS Works files.Now, if any of these were in Open Doc format, I would have full access to them.

Finally, consider that in the past I have said some really stupid things, and I'm not even a politician. I certainly don't want anyone to be able to figure out what I have said. Thus, I am in favor of closed source formats that go way, way out of dat

Be polite - this will make them much more likely to listen. If you are feeling angry, take a walk outside, have a nice snack then come back when you are calmed down.

Make personal contact - fax or phone where you can; reinforce emails by calling up to check that they got them. Write your own letter, based on somebody elses template if you need, but with your own information. If they promise to look into it, call back later to find out what they found out.

State clearly your relationship to them - resident of the state / local business / supporter / floating voter etc. Always find a reason why they should take notice of you. Identify yourself clearly and let them call you back later (better to give a business phone or mobile so that they don't call you at home during election campaign time though)

Give information - links to pages about problems [grokdoc.net] - specific links to ODF sites [odfalliance.org] or the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] etc. to show alternatives. However, read through those pages yourself and pick out and explain specific points from them that you think are important.

Be efficient. Make your point early; don't drown them in extra information; Say only things which you think are important.

Be original. Give specific information about your position and how you will benefit from alternative solutions. Show that you care about it and why.

Dear Mr Leno;

I am the owner of a small web hosting company. I am writing to support "California A.B. 1668 : Open Document Format, Open Source.". We would like to be able to automatically send out pre-filled billing forms from our billing system and expect all our customers to be able to complete them easily. Unfortuantely, the current de-facto standard for documents is Microsofts.doc format and that is too complex for us to be able to add it to the billing system. A new alteranative exists in the ISO standard Open Document Format. If that was widely adopted our problem would be solved. Unfortuantely, Microsoft is trying to block this adoption by having a fake new standard based on.doc. This isn't really a standard because it doesn't fully specifiy how the format works (please see http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/EOOXML_objections [grokdoc.net] section 10.2 "Cloning the behaviour of proprietary applications") and is far to big for us to deal with, let alone be a reasonably reviewed ISO standard ( see http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/EOOXML_objections [grokdoc.net] secton 11 "Ecma 376 cannot be adequately evaluated within the 30-day evaluation period")

We believe that if Microsofts standard is blocked and the Open Document Format is standardised for state use, in future we would be able to rely on it's availability everywhere and our buisiness would be able to work much better with its customers.

As you know well, we are strongly committed to supporting the good of our state and my wife and I have often run coffee mornings for the state assembly which you have attended yourself. We think that this bill would clearly improve life in our state and look forward to hearing that you are committed to supporting it.

If the tide turns, and some big customers demand ODF support, will Microsoft have its business depend on some weirdo hackers in a sourcefourge project? I think not. So 50$ sais ODF support in MSoffice is already built and tested, as a compile line option currently switched off by the marketing department. Apply some pressure and witness the fastest patch in history... By the way, if your neighbour or your PHB asks you the difference between ODF and the MS XML thingy, summarize like this: The ODF spec is

Use of ODF will keep more money in California and less flowing to Washington state.

Governments are responsible for guaranteeing archives, minimizing expenses, and reducing barriers, therefore ODF is best choice for them.

These days a monetary figure can be assigned what it costs Microsoft in negative PR, lobbying and advertising this anti-ODF campaign. They could make more money by instead becoming the main proponent of ODF and other open standards, and developing commercial SDKs to develop software for all platforms based on truly open standards.

Microsoft also is harmed by the effects of its embrace and extend campaign. Not only in hatred by potential developers, but also because of the monetary cost of running the campaign, and the chaos and reduced size of the market it causes.

Microsoft could support independent developers by allowing them to rent SDKs and code of other participating vendors, and allowing developers to pay in part by product royalties. By creating a new ecosystem in this way Microsoft can become the facilitator and also own part of the ecosystem's code base, increasing market size and opportunities. It may even by quick footwork, honesty, sincerity and trust building be able to draw in most of the industry for niche products (say an open standards based tax form creation and submission infrastructure).

Microsoft is a dinosaur walking on treacherous ground. It has depended on a cynical and unethical strategy relying on bloatware, hatchetwork, lobbying, FUD, legal games, discounts, etc. By reversing 180 degrees its current orientation, away from FUD and Embrace/Extend, it will gain amazingly broad new horizons for profit, reducing risk and not incidentally creating new reasons for people to stick with Office.

Microsoft also resembles Sony quite a lot, which is not good for Microsoft. Both companies are impossible to make a deal with, they either try to buy you or destroy you. Both companies are utterly cynical and untrusted. Both companies are a bucket of fragmented interests, their strengths wasted on their habits of looking inward at other divisions and not at their customers. Both dream of huge profits from Hollywood, which is silly (see next point).

Both Microsoft and Sony have ignored George Lucas' comments that Hollywood does not make a profit in theaters, which is why he wants to go into TV. They also ignore that the movie industry is not as profitable as it would seem, due to the huge number of flops (since they are filled with cynical crap creators too), is an unsteady earner which also translates to risk, and is the driving force behind DRM which has set the electronics industry back 15 years and spurs development of alternate delivery systems that they cannot control as well (piracy has a tiny effect on actual profit now but has risen to equal the pornography industry in driving creative programmers to invent creative, new systems). Additionally both Microsoft and Sony have a bizarre interest in supporting only the biggest players despite contemporary media distribution systems' being so much more supportive of the medium to long tail, i.e. smaller bands/producers.

Take the example of Sony which constantly releases expensive hardware that is lower in quality than the Sony name used to signify and that only works with Sony products. Sony gets its lunch eaten so often, it is its own worst enemy. Microsoft and Sony both share a very similar conceit, inflated self-importance, cynicism, misguided goals, and disparagement of both vendors and customers. Unfortunately they both have corporate cultures that are so strongly biased in this way that the cultures actually warp otherwise sound minds, witness what Mhyrvold has to show for his work there. Since even scientists are swayed by bizarre corporate cultures, the corporation consistently generates failures, seeks to recoup them with grandiose schemes, and in the end needs to draw in new blood from the outside in an attempt to solve the unsolvable.

1. Use of ODF will keep more money in California and less flowing to Washington state.

Not necessarily true. While MS employs many people and brings in money to Washington, for tax purposes, they are taxed according to Utah's tax laws. Don't ask me how they do it; the bottom line is that they save a lot of money because Utah has very low taxes. This is another reason I don't like MS. At every turn, they are ethically challenged. They are HQ in WA, but have come up with a way not to pay WA.

I'd guess that all companies, once they get big enough, start believing their own hype. Managers start thinking that they have some secret sauce that means they don't have to deal with the normal realities facing other companies. They start avoiding standard, easy solutions because they think their own homegrown idea, even if it's completely incompatible with everything else in the world, will magically be better. Then they get secretive, partly to conceal their own bad decisions. The reinvent the wheel

This ODF stuff is just another shitty typewriter document to go with Word documents. Ugh. You might as well call it SHITHTML it is another useless HTML replacement. Think of how useless XHTML has been and it at least attempted to be as similar to HTML as it could be. ODF is more shit that has to be converted into something else before it can even do something useful. It is like you are saving your word processor's cache file to disk and then expecting someone else to do the rest of the job to make something

If the people Microsoft is calling out to had half a brain, they'd realize that open formats are a great thing, even if they want to use Microsoft products. You know, so you, as a sysadmin, can easily dump your data into microsoft word/excel/powerpoint for the boss's monthly numbers or whatever. Yeah, there's better ways to do it, but then it'd be more easily possible for those who must use those products for whatever reason.

Why should I care about ODF vs OOXML? Both are so complex that they can only be implemented by big corporations (and Ok, big Open Source groups). Give me something for which a moderately computer-educated citizen can write a parser to, for example, find inconsistencies or unusual items in a state budget spreadsheet. Plain HTML will do nicely and there is no reason government documents should have formatting needs that exceed that.

Why should I care about ODF vs [MS's] OOXML? Both are so complex that they can only be implemented by big corporations (and Ok, big Open Source groups).

Incorrect. The difference is that MS's OOXML can only be fully and completely implemented by those who agree to Microsoft's terms, as the OOXML specification depends on and references secret, Microsoft-proprietary intellectual property. In contrast, ODF can be fully implemented by anyone regardless of an agreement with Microsoft.

The embrace of a fully open standard will lead to innovation within a stagnant industry. This will lead to an improvement in Office-related products, as there will be more than

A long time ago, in a past decade(~1982~1992), in the early days of home HS/ADP technology, When microsoft was but a baby corps, there were many many operating systems (OS) and file formats for each and every OS/application. Then microsoft said

(~1989~1994) lets provide file format conversion for all our big competitors file formats to microsoft file formates. As microsoft fed on conversion converts and got to be the biggest, fattest, and dumbest OSD (original software developer) they chose the path of other

This isn't about vendor preference, it's about freedom of public access to public documents.For the public to allow vendor lock and depend on a single vendor for future access because they accepted a vendor standard is "just plain stupid".

No vendor whould be forced out, but the product the public entities buy would be standardized.

The State of California is a customer and, like you, has to right to choose what it buys based on measurements of price vs. performance. If California says it requires software for its bureaus that uses neutral file formats, then the expression of that requirement is no more legislating people out of business than a requirement that paint bought for state buildings meet minimum performance and environmntal standards. As California, the great state where I reside, is spending taxpayer money, there are occasional efforts towards ensuring that the money isn't being spent in stupid ways. (I shall not be reimbursing any one for keyboards lost while reading the prior sentence.)

Something I'm really curious about: where are the Microsoft shareholders on these questions. Why do they think that when large customers start to evolve different requirements, the proper response is to spend money on publicity, lobbying, and advocacy advertising and to play chicken with the customers, rather than evolving with the market?

If California passes this, I imagine Microsoft will put people to work on a patch to office, so that you can "save as"(open format)... of course the.doc format will remain the default, making it a pain in the butt to use... but I think this is what will eventually happen. It's just a matter of time. It's possible it may even already be written and they are just waiting until a major development such as this happens.

If MS can guarantee and be bonded that documents that are archived now can be accessed in 50 years time, and can be accessed and processed from today until then with software they provide for free (and I mean zero cost), well, then I agree - there's no issue.For a democratic process to function, there should not be a price tag on public information. If the data is stored in a format for which you have to pay to access it you are in principle harming democratic process. I do realise that the opposite is ha

I'm against any law designed to force out any specific competitor from any market...

I guess you don't realise that not only is there no reason Microsoft couldn't produce ODF documents, but the open source community is already stepping up to the plate with free ODF plugins for Microsoft products?

A law that dictates that ODF is used for the state's documents does not exclude any vendor from the market. Microsoft is welcome to add ODF support to its office suite, but refuses to do so. In other words, they are excluding themselves from competing by not supporting ODF. Instead of adding support for ODF, they try to push states to standardize on their format instead.